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The Orientalist Express

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Illustration by James Victore; photograph of Richard Francis Burton by Rischgitz/Getty Images

In the heyday of Victorian expansionism, a certain sort of Englishman believed he could do anything, go anywhere, discover everything, rule every­where. None believed in that credo more passionately than Sir Richard Francis Burton: adventurer, linguist, soldier, archaeologist, poet, spy, mystic, fencer, diplomat, pederast (possibly), sexual explorer (certainly), translator, controversialist and master of disguise. Indestructible, charismatic and extravagantly scarred (the legacy of a Somali spear that passed through both cheeks), Burton was also irascible, domineering, unquenchably curious and slightly unhinged.

Burton mastered, it was said, at least two dozen languages. He adopted Muslim customs and Islamic ritual so perfectly that he was able to complete the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1853 undetected, having completed his disguise by the radical precaution of having himself circumcised. He scandalized London by privately publishing an unexpurgated translation of the Kama Sutra. He plunged into the African interior in search of the source of the Nile, a journey of almost unimaginable discomfort and courage that ended, predictably enough, in a celebrated public feud with his companion, John Hanning Speke.

This strange and brilliant man constantly invented and reinvented himself, and despite his voluminous writings, he remains an enigma. In “The Collector of Worlds,” Iliya Troyanov has turned Burton’s unbelievable life into believable fiction, achieving a rounded and satisfying portrait that traditional biography could never match.

This is not the first time Burton has appeared in fiction. He is referred to by name in the 1912 novel “The Lost World” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In that book, a character remarks wistfully that “the big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there’s no room for romance anywhere.” Burton, as imagined by Troyanov, is compelled by the need to fill in the empty spaces. “What other aim can there be except to find a meaning for the white patches on the world’s maps?” he observes.

That is one of the few moments of introspection Troyanov allows his character. Instead of revealing Burton through his own voice and thoughts, the novelist tells Burton’s story largely through the observations of others: the Indian servant who acts as his domestic factotum and procurer; the other pilgrims on the hajj to Mecca; the former slave who guides him into the uncharted heart of Africa. This many-voiced narrative can be confusing at times, but it cleverly turns convention on its head: rather than allowing Burton to explain his own life, it makes him the object of curiosity and wonder, explored by the very people he has come to “discover.” Burton himself is the exotic.

The first act of the three-act drama covers Burton’s service in India with the British East India Company in the 1840s. While his fellow imperialists devote themselves to bridge and billiards, Burton plunges into the rich linguistic, spiritual and sexual life around him. He even attempts to learn the language of animals, gathering a troop of monkeys to dine with him nightly — farcical occasions that dismay his servants and fellow officers alike. Burton’s extraordinary grasp of Indian languages and his talent for disguise made him the ideal spy. Too good, in the view of his seniors. When sent to investigate a male brothel allegedly frequented by his brother officers, Burton produces such a detailed report it is assumed he must have been a customer. Burton’s refusal to reveal the identity of an Indian informant compounds the official view that he has, in that most damning of British colonial euphemisms, “gone native.”

Burton — in both fiction and real life — didn’t care. There was only one person whose opinion he truly valued. In his most memorable line of poetry, he voiced an adamantine self-belief: “Do what thy manhood bids thee do / From none but self expect applause; / He noblest lives and noblest dies / Who makes and keeps his self-made laws.”

Burton’s account of his pilgrimage to Mecca made him famous. In “The Moonstone,” Wilkie Collins transformed him into Mr. Murthwaite “the celebrated Indian traveler, who, at risk of his life, had penetrated in disguise where no European had set foot before.” Yet this was no mere act of imperial derring-do. Burton was motivated by the urge to witness and record, to immerse himself in the different and borrow other worlds.

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Troyanov depicts a man flitting among cultures and identities, part pious Muslim, part Christian English officer, part pilgrim, part spy. Burton is the quintessence of the sensitive, acquisitive traveler, absorbing as he passes, taking on color from his surroundings, but never settling, never faithful. One of the Ottoman officials, cogitating on Burton’s possible motives for the hajj, observes piquantly that “because he believes in everything and nothing, he can . . . transform himself into any precious stone.”

There is more than a flicker of auto­biography here, for Troyanov has himself collected many worlds on the way to this novel. Born in Bulgaria in 1965, he fled to West Germany with his family when he was 6, and he grew up in Kenya. His travel books “Mumbai to Mecca” and “Along the Ganges” describe his own visits to Muslim and Hindu holy sites. He now lives in Vienna.

Troyanov grew up speaking Bulgarian and English, and writes in German (the novel was originally published as “Der Weltensammler”). Like Burton, he seems to have transcended the notion that each of us is wedded to a single native language. In this translation by William Hobson, Troyanov paints Burton in broad strokes. Large swaths of his protagonist’s life are simply omitted. Many conversations, events, thoughts and people are wholly imaginary; others are factual. Troyanov offers no clues as to where history ends and invention begins. Some will find this form of fictional biography frustrating, but for these readers there are already numerous biographies of Burton.

Troyanov succeeds at a different level, recreating that hunger for knowledge, hardship and space that was Burton’s distinctive cast of mind, depicting a man at once hard to like and impossible not to admire. In some ways he was representative of his time, race and class, while resolutely nonconformist and solitary. Burton, as his African guide observes, is “like an old elephant who has withdrawn from the herd and always drinks alone at the watering hole.”

Burton’s wife, Isabel, plays a minor part in this fictional rendition of his life, yet in a way she made the book necessary. Burton, the rogue male of Victorian discovery, ended his days as the British consul in Trieste, a representative of the crown but as far away from the rest of the herd as possible. When he died in 1890, his widow, to protect his “reputation,” burned his private papers: the erotic translations, diaries, notes, poems, letters and unpublished manuscripts from a lifetime’s wandering and observation.

It was an act of staggering literary vandalism, and one that inevitably undermined all subsequent effort at biography. Isabel Burton’s bonfire ensured that a part of the explorer could never be discovered. Troyanov’s novel is itself an act of brave exploration, setting out to chart the unknown and unknowable by filling in the blank spaces of Richard Francis Burton.

THE COLLECTOR OF WORLDS

By Iliya Troyanov.

Translated by William Hobson

454 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.99

Ben Macintyre is associate editor of The Times of London. His latest book is “Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Orientalist Express. Today's Paper|Subscribe